Murder in the Hearse Degree Read Online Free Page A

background to gawk on cue. I come across the show in reruns sometimes when I drag my television out of the closet and fire her up. It’s like having a little magic window onto the neighborhood, seeing my neighbors there on the tube, all of them working hard to get their crowd-scene-gawker Emmy. The show is gone now, but they did leave behind a false door down at the maritime building that has “Baltimore City Police” stenciled on it. You can yank on that thing all day if you’d like to—I’ve seen people do it—but if you’re looking for the affirming balm of law enforcement, you’re not going to get it there.
    The funeral home that I run with my Aunt Billie is a couple of blocks in from the harbor. It’s called Sewell and Sons Family Funeral Home, but don’t let that fool you. There was never a son in the game; Aunt Billie and my ugly Uncle Stu never had any knee nibblers, they simply thought the name would be good for business. I moved in with the two of them when I was twelve, after the beer truck made its quick work of my parents and my sister. One thing led to another—which is, after all, the nature of things—and came a day that ugly Uncle Stu was dead and I was a licensed mortician all ready to take his place. I took a stab at convincing Billie to rename the place Harold & Maude’s. To Billie’s credit, she almost bought it.
    Aunt Billie and Darryl Sandusky were sitting on the front steps of the funeral home smoking cigarettes as I came up the sidewalk.
    “Hey, Sewell,” I said to Billie. “What’s with the runt?”
    “I’m not a runt,” Darryl said.
    “How tall are you?” I asked.
    “Five feet one and a quarter inches.”
    “That’s a runt.”
    Darryl snorted. “Give me a break. I’m only twelve.”
    “I forgot. The cigarette makes you look older. Gee, I guess that’s the point.”
    Aunt Billie shaded her eyes to look up at me. “Darryl and I are discussing the state of the world.”
    “It stinks,” Darryl said. He took a humongous drag on his cigarette.
    “Shouldn’t you be off chasing cars with your friends?” I asked.
    The kid squinted up at me. “What do you think I am, a dog?”
    “Does your mother know you’re sitting here with an old lady putting nails in your coffin?”
    “Huh?”
    “Skip it.”
    “Darryl wants to be a mortician,” Billie said. “I’ve been explaining to him the vagaries of the profession.”
    “Are you trying to squeeze me out, kid?” I said.
    “I’ll be dead one day, Hitchcock,” Billie said. “Perhaps Darryl could be your new partner.”
    “Sandusky and Hitch? I don’t know. Sounds like a bad cop show.” I considered Darryl again. “You look pretty scrawny to me.”
    “You were scrawny at his age,” Billie remarked.
    “Yeah,” Darryl said.
    “I’ll tell you what, next body we get you can help me scrub it down.”
    Darryl flicked his cigarette into the street. He looked over at Billie. “Is he shittin’ me, Mrs. Sewell?”
    “No, Darryl. Hitchcock is a man of his word. I’m sure he’s not ‘shittin” you.”
    “All right!”
    “Don’t go planning on any big busty blondes,” I warned him. “You take what you get in this business.”
    Darryl pawed the air. “You’re nuts.”
    Who told him?
    Billie finished her cigarette and handed it to Darryl. The boy flicked it out into the middle of the street. Billie smiled up at me.
    “My minion.”
    I went inside to my office and leafed through my mail. Big yawn there. I had a fax dangling out of the machine. A mortician in Columbus, Ohio, was being sued by the family of a customer who—there is no way to put this delicately—had blown up about a week after his interment in the family’s mausoleum. It’s rare, but it happens, and when it does it usually suggests a lousy embalming—or no embalming whatsoever. The explosion can be surprisingly powerful. In this case the door of the mausoleum had literally cracked when a piece of the concrete vault slammed into it at mach